Flat and Minor Characters

ELT 37:1 1994 Flat and Minor Characters David Galef. The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. xii + 228 pp. $35.00 THE WRITER'S CRAFT and the role of characters are hardly fashionable topics. David Galef s opening gambit to take seriously L. C. Knights's famous, even notorious, question "How many chUdren had Lady Macbeth?" might, then, lay claim to almost disconcerting novelty, an impression sharpened by his now obligatory opening chapter of theoretical positioning that invokes Bakhtin, Barthes, and Lacan as readily as Forster, Leavis, and Trilling. In addition to defending the study's deliberate theoretical eclecticism, the introduction broaches reader-responses to secondary characters and establishes a taxonomy of flat and minor characters divided according to whether their function is structural or mimetic. Galef then focuses closely on the varied purposes of the "supporting casts" of three High Modernist war-horses: Heart of Darkness, Howards End, and Jacob's Room. An extremely brief coda deals with minor characters in painting, film, and radio drama, and an appendix lists the named and unnamed characters in Jacob's Room. The role of minor characters in Heart of Darkness is not at this date undiscovered critical terrain: the "centrality" of its "marginal" figures —the Roman Trader, the Russian Harlequin, the African woman, the Intended—have been accorded what must be near-exhaustive analysis . Galef nonetheless engagingly hits a sufficient number of the right notes, managing a reading of the noveUa that whatever it lacks in dazzling originality relies upon and conveys much solid good sense. In the most substantial chapter in The Supporting Cast, the discussion targets the interaction between character and narrative exposition, the contributions of the minor characters as foreshadowers and as foils, and technical elements such as metonymy and delayed decoding. A neglect of Conrad's use of the grotesque and, more seriously disabling, an unawareness of Cedric Watts's seminal The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (1984), which identifies a concealed murder plot in the novella in which the minor characters play major roles, limits the observations made here. Having given to literary criticism the enduring if not wholly satisfactory term "flat character," Forster is another obligatory reference point, a classic example of a writer dependent on supporting characters to 104 BOOK REVIEWS motivate plot and give verisimilitude and depth to a wide range of social and thematic issues. After somewhat laboriously establishing how minor characters forward the secondary theme of Anglo-German relations, the chapter on Howards End convincingly demonstrates how Forster's type characters long for expansion and complexity. (Mrs. Munt and Tibby are weU-taken cases in point.) It also examines how the secondary characters in collaboration with the narrator reflect or, by contrast, oppose Forsterian values. The separation of characters into sheep and goats, a problem besetting Forster generally, weakens this novel much more than Galef allows, however, and most clearly exposes its ideological tensions and class allegiances. Peter Widdowson's Howards End: Fiction as History (1977), whatever its occasionaUy warping partisanship , ought to have provided essential context here since it provides considerable insight into the topic of class and the role of the Basts in particular. Woolfs characters in Jacob's Room also contribute, Galef argues, to furthering ideological ends. In their variety and multiplicity the secondary characters function niimeticaUy to give the impression of an entire society while they also serve as one of Woolf s principal technical means for essaying a new kind of fiction, responsive to the vibrations of life and critical of the exclusivity the patriarchy imposes and societal conditioning reinforces. Galef briefly pursues the parallel function of minor characters in Ulysses and suggestively comments that their very abundance , the attempt by Joyce and Woolf mimetically to incorporate both the fullness and diversity of experience, tends to emphasize pattern over individuality. Unfortunately, this chapter, which is potentially the most original, is the book's least satisfactory. After its promising opening it evolves into a relatively straightforward description of the kinds of flat and minor characters ("Characters as Canvas," "Characters as Artists," "Unaccountable Characters") including in its survey even insects and plants that exhibit anthropomorphic...